Good Night, Sleep Tight...

So before I came out here, the only idea I had about the place I'd be living was the pictures I'd seen from the website for the place. Pictures that made it look like my bedroom and kitchen could very well look like this:

So when I showed up, I was quite surprised to see the place looked a lot like the pictures above, only without all the nice stuff or cleanliness, or, well, anything that would resemble the pictures above in any way, shape or form.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like the place was terrible or anything. In my 5 years living in student housing, and my 2 years in Denmark, I've certainly lived in much worse places than this. That was, until this happened...

Around last Friday or Saturday, I noticed that I was starting to develop a strange rash around my wrist and the underside of my arm. I wasn't terribly concerned, seeing how I was still adjusting to living in a new place, I figured I was just having some kinda weird reaction to the cheap laundry detergent I used that weekend, or that I was just allergic to some aspect of DC that I'd get used to eventually or something. When over the span of a day it went from a couple bumps on my wrist and arm, to what looked like small mosquito bites spread over the underside of my arms, by my ankles, and even up onto my neck, the idea of it being a rash quickly went away. Bug bites was the next most obvious thought, but they looked so uniformed and patterned, I had several in perfectly straight lines of 3 to 5 bites on my arms. Then, with a sinking feeling, I suddenly thought to myself:

"I wonder if it could be bedbugs?"

Initially I dismissed this notion fairly quickly, "bedbugs? What is this, 1872?"

But something about it caught hold, and that night I went online to do a little research about the bedbug. The first thing I read about their bites was that it can be hard to tell whether or not it's for sure bedbugs as they're only out for a couple hours in the middle of the night, and people's reactions to their bites can vary greatly. The second thing I read, however, was the statement of my impending doom -- that a common distinguishing trait of bedbug bites is formation of bites in a line of 3 or so, given the nickname of "breakfast, lunch and dinner."

Here are a couple pictures I tried to take of my arms, didn't turn out too great, and I wasn't able to take a picture of some parts of my arms where I have like a good line of 5 or 6 bites right next to each other.

These self shot pictures really don't do the bites much justice, I've got a lot more than what you can see there... And yes, they itch. They itch a lot.

So my immediate reaction upon the realization that we were dealing with bedbugs? We'll say it was something like amping up my anxiety level from my usual anxiety level of about 0-1 to a full scale, Patrick C. Davies - level 11 anxiety status. I mean, what would you do if you suddenly realized your bed was infested by a bunch of these:

Oh and just in case you were wondering, the one pictured above is "engorged" - meaning it just ate. Yeah, disgusting..

Needless to say, I freaked out, and slept in the hallway closet on our extra mattress that night. I got a solid 3 hours of sleep, waking up at 4 am, and not being able to fall back to sleep. I spent spent as much extra time as I could spare the next day studying up on the little buggers on the internet. Turns out, they're making quite the comeback in the United States right now, especially in Hotels, Cruise Ships, and College student housing. I contacted our RA, and the USU internship coordinator (since that's the school in charge of the housing), and they told me to to just toss the old mattress and box spring and use a spare set the guys up on the 6th floor had. So as soon as I got home from work, I got started.

I took off all of my bedding, sealed it up in a garbage bag, and tossed it in to wash on hot, then go through two dryer cycles. I then dragged the mattress down to the dumpster, and got started on the box spring. I was pretty sure this is where the little buggers were setting up shop, and when I looked underneath it, I started to see the brown staining near corners and holes that is supposedly classic evidence of bedbugs. Since my paranoia was in full swing, I wasn't going to take any chances. I stopped at the drugstore on my way home from the Metro stop, and proceeded to completely seal up the box spring in the saran wrap I purchased there. It's not as easy as some of you might think, but it made me feel much safer once the time came to take it down to the dumpster. Last thing I wanted was to have a whole colony of bedbugs fall out every time I shifted or bumped lunking that thing down 3 flights of stairs.

Once I'd gotten rid of all of that, I vacuumed up the floor a good 2 or 3 times, washed the clothes I wore through this whole process, just in case, and took a breather for a good hour or two.

When the time came to go to bed, I decided to take a closer look at the bed frame before I put the new mattress and box spring down. Good call. The first place I looked, I saw what first simply looked like a small knot in the wood was nothing of the sort.

And upon closer inspection:

Little son of a... Luckily I'd purchased some packaging tape to seal up a hole in the wall I was worried may have been an additional hiding place for our little friends, so I promptly stuck Mr. Bedbug to the tape, folded it over and began a closer inspection of the bed frame. The results were disheartening, I found a bedbug in almost every possible hiding place. In a way it was relieving to actually catch a few of them, and know I wasn't crazy or something, but with every bug I found, I became more and more sure that I wasn't about to be sleeping in that bed that night.

One of the ones I caught, for comparison (to be fair, this one was actually already dead, it's just the most un-smashed one I could find. It wasn't the largest or smallest one I found, but a little on the larger side I'd say)

I wasn't about to throw in the towel without checking every last nook and cranny of that blasted thing, so once I was sure I'd caught and taped every last bug, I took a break for a bit and weighed my options. After a half hour or so, I checked on the bedframe again, and saw a pretty small bug crawling right along part of it in the wide open. I killed it, showered, put on fresh clothes, and spent the night on the couch.

The next day I had no fresh bites, came home, dismanteled the bedframe, threw it out, vacuumeed another 3 times, washed clothes again, set up a new bedframe, placed each leg of the bed inside of a plastic cup (I need to find something bigger to put the legs in, that was the best I could find at the time - but supposedly they have pretty bad traction, and can't climb up plastic like that very well), and lined the actual legs with packaging tape - sticky-side out.

Irony? The fact that I've shown the whole world my arms covered in bedbug bites, but my mom is going to be more concerned that I have a picture of my laundry sitting on top of my bed.

My roommate Will found this whole operation to be quite amusing, but it's mostly just for my own psychological well being. As I'm sure many of you can understand, falling asleep for the first few times in the same bed where a large number of pests feasted upon you for a solid week, is no easy matter.

So I slept in the bed last night, and as far as I can tell, I have no new bites from last night. I'm going to give it a few days to be sure, but make sure you all wish for me that the bed bugs won't bite.